Into the Breach II: Toxicology

Welcome back to Into the Breach. In this entry, we are going to focus on the Azur Alliance. The Azur Alliance fills a unique roll in terms of factions. It is fairly light on powerhouses, with Arbiters being the obvious exceptions, but as a faction, they fill a roll of having a great amount of choice of light, fast units that can dish out attacks far faster then the opponent can dodge. Even better, in my opinion, is the ease with with the Alliance can poison threatening enemy units, thus limiting their options, and giving every action a price in blood.

The star of any Azur list that wants to rely on Poison is Wolfgang Metzger. With his ability to double the poison damage on all units within his Control Zone, poisoned attacks, and a special attack that raises his poison threat to 16, he really shines. As a crucial component to a poison list, Wolfgang is best kept defended, and if at all possible backed up to avoid his getting double teamed. His built-in ability to Blind anyone in base contact is useful, but not something that can be relied on.

Backing up Metzger is the Team of Les Jager. This team, made up of the Colonel, Kristen, Rhinehold, and Kyler make a strong compliment to Wolfgang. Kristen brings further poison to the table, and in a ranged form, allowing her to remain somewhat out of harms way. Rhinehold is wonderful for forcing poisoned units into Wolfgangs Control Zone, thus forcing them to deal with the double poison damage. Kyler, on the other hand, has the ability to move hidden into combat with a unit threatening your center, and then strike with Oblidiom. The next turn he can use Dancing Mad to force a unit to burn action points on dodges, and hopefully inflict further damage. The final member of Les Jager, The Colonel, is a massive asset, not only does the Les Jager team card allow him to support the line, either granting Kyler extra attacks, move a Jager where it needs to be, or grant an extra action point for a dodge. The Initiative ability he brings to the table, as well as the damage he can deal with Hephastios Crest are both useful, and not to be overlooked either.

The last two models that bring this toxic team together are Kujaku Hime and Adolf Brunner. Kujaku is a fast, deadly anti-armor unit. She ignores terrain penalties, and ignores armor in hand to hand combat. She also moves at a blazing 12/16. She is something of a glass cannon with no armor and only 13 LP, so make sure you are saving Action Points to dodge if you plan to engage a full-strength unit. Another point about Kujaku is her drawback, Orochi’s Curse, which poisons her on a roll of 6+. Obviously this is something to be avoided, so I highly recommend taking the Serum advantage card on her.

Adolf Brunner is a classic support model, and an all-star in this list. His Snake Blood sits at a potent effect 16. The great thing here is that since Adolf’s abilities are all Magic abilities, he can make use of the Control Bound advantage card, bringing his poison effect up to 17. With an effect that high, and the ability to poison two models a turn if he doesn’t move, its not an exaggeration to say Aldolf is one of the most valuable units in this list.

So, there you have it, Azur Alliance Toxicology. If you want me to write an Into the Breach about your favorite faction, let me know in the comments.

Hi Justin,
Thank you for the article. I have just started collecting Anima tactics model – Samael. Would you be able to write about this faction. It seens that all other factions have some super special strength but Samael is almost average at everything. At the moment I have half wariors and half mistics (Dina,Aoi, Bael,Chesire,Kiros and Nahimana). I was thinking to exchange Anna Never with Bael seeing that I can get extra Gnosis point for Dina. Thank you and look forward to next article.

Very nice article about poison in Azur! The first thing to understand about this tactic is that it’s a secondary strategy. It’s possible to focus entirely on it but as Reinjie said you can be heavily countered by protection so if you really want to center your strategy around the poisson you must have some reliable ways to get rid off that positive effect.

The real posibility of a list focused in poison started with the 4ª azur advantage, with that your multi-attackers without an in build poison like kyler and dagger become doubly dangerous. When using this advantage any extra attack is a chance to poison so the more attack you have the better, the multiattackers are very valuables and some spammable summons like Djinn’s slaves or the Hellhounds too.

Another important point to play poison is remember that it’s an strategy that takes some time to kill the adversary (it’s not like an alpha strike list) so you should do your list tanky enough to survive until the poison do its job. For that arbiters like Mijhail and Arkeid are the best for this kind of strategy. Others models which are tanky or who helps to keeps your party alive are Dagger or the colonel, khaine, Juliette or Sophia.

As commented the protection is the effect which would ruin your strategy so if you rely heavily in poison you must use 2 nulifiers and focus in kill the models which can spam protection or remove negative effects. For this Bella + Aqua are a good choice in this kind of lists, Bella is really versatile and one of the few models which may remove the protection from enemy models and she also has a poison attack.

Also as commented keep Wolfang with life is a must so the defensive equipment and the arbiters looking after him is mandatory.

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